Chasing after your car is not an activity I would recommend
Admittedly that’s overstating things a bit: the vehicle only traveled about five feet before slowly settling into a small ditch, and the “chasing” consisted of what could most liberally be described as a “brisk walk.” But it’s still frightening to have your car, doors locked with no one inside, rolling away from you as you juggle an $800 digital camera and a half-broken plastic spare key.
I can talk big, throwing around the word “roadgeek,” citing the Manual for Universal Traffic Control Devices and bitching about the latest big green atrocity afflicted upon us by IDOT District 8, but rarely do I actually hit the road. Maybe it’s highway fatigue brought on by traveling the same state route/Interstate combo several times a week, or perhaps I’m just too lazy.
Friday I was faced with seven-and-a-half hours to kill between school and work, which brought the option of being really lazy, and sitting in front of the television and computer, or actually getting off my ass and using that brand new 512 MB Compact Flash card. I’ve only been planning digitalroute66.com since last October: God forbid I actually do some work on it.
At seventy degrees and light blue, cloudless skies, Mother Nature made up my mind for me. The college itself lying along the primary alignment of Route 66, I jumped onto the historic pavement and headed north.
Someone once asked me the lure of the roads, and why I referred to myself as a roadgeek. I busted out my usual explanation: Carlisle, Indiana. The town of less than a square mile and a thousand people sits on the west side of the Hoosier state, about a half-hour north of Vincennes.
It’s also about five hours from Chicago. If you ever plan to make the trip, don’t worry about bringing a map.
US 41 drags its four lanes along the west border of Carlisle, and a couple hundred miles later those same stretches of pavement are the only obstruction between Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain and Lake Michigan. Any resident of Carlisle can jump on 41, their highway, and find him or herself traversing Lake Shore Drive, taking in one of the largest and most beautiful spectacles America has to offer. One road, two very different cities, one straight shot.
That amazement was found in the eyes of an older gentleman that stopped me in Hamel. The village, seven miles north of Edwardsville, is one of those towns Interstate 55 junction with Illinois 140, a block east of Route 66 in Hamel, Illinoisforgotten by realignment: masses of cars still travel past St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and its neon cross, but they’re now on the other side of a fence that separates Interstate 55 from its mother road ten feet to the west. (The two roads part ways at Hamel, to meet up again only briefly in St. Louis.) There’s an exit off of the expressway, and a Shell station on Illinois 140 still benefits from highway traffic, but very few make their way to the tiny downtown.
He was working in his yard in the north part of the town, and after spotting me taking pictures (and briefly running after my Grand Am) he figured me for a tax assessor. Having been told there may be such persons in the area taking snapshots of the road, and that they could answer any questions he might have, he waved me down. There was disappointment that I wasn’t who he had hoped, but learning my true intentions brought a smile to his face.
“You know how long that road goes, don’t you? All the way to Chicago.” He had to pause. He was standing just a few feet off of pavement that carried countless carloads across America, and was a direct link between his tiny hamlet and the Windy City. The town, as most all along America’s Main Street do, appreciates its place in history, with banners adorning most every light pole and countless businesses, old and new, adopting the Route 66 name. Here, it’s a pottery store and auto body shop.
It was outside the pottery shop that I gained my own Route 66 memory: being locked out of my car while it decided to take a solo trip up the Mother Road. I’d already stopped about ten times alongside the fifteen previous miles, leaving the car running, in park, doors locked and hazard lights on. One time I went to get out, only to realize I had failed to move the gear from drive to park. “Silly Peter,” I thought, “you don’t need to lose your car.”
St. Paul's Lutheran Church, with its neon cross, just north of Hamel, IllinoisTwenty minutes later I repeated the feat, except that I didn’t realize my error until the vehicle started to move. Walking along side, vainly attempting to stop it by grabbing the driver-side mirror, I whipped out my wallet to grab my spare key while still juggling my Canon PowerShot G2. The car settled into a small ditch as I finally was able to insert the key and ditch my wallet (in favor of throwing down the camera) only to have it break almost in half and fail to open the door. A second try got me into the car.
An amused but concerned citizen heading the other way stopped to see if I needed assistance, but as I easily backed the car onto the road I declined and thanked him. He promised he’d be back that way in a minute, just in case. I headed north, relieved to have both my car and camera under control and undamaged.
Too bad at that moment I had forgotten my wallet, still lying alongside the road where I had tossed it down in my haste to recapture my car. Five minutes later I reclaimed it, finding it tented in the dirt exactly where I expected it to be.
Soulsby's Shell Station, Mt. Olive, Illinois
66 runs alongside 55 for a while, meeting Livingston and brushing against Staunton before heading to the east side of the Interstate where the highway turns to a four-lane route (though IDOT only utilizes one half, since there’s no reason to maintain all the lanes of what is now just a highway/frontage road.) The newer pavement heads west of Mt. Olive, home of a Union Miners’ Cemetery and memorial honoring the community’s role as a coal mining town and hub for union activity in the late 1880s. The earlier two-lane route takes you through town and past Soulsby’s Shell Station, where as I stopped to take pictures the motorists pausing at a nearby stop sign smiled. This isn’t a state highway: these were locals who found pleasure in what history their town had to offer.
Unused four-lane stretch entering Litchfield, Illinois, northboundTo be honest, the trip through rural central Illinois provides primarily the same view one is afforded by the more modern, and faster, Interstate 55 just a mile (or less, at times) to the west. It’s a beautiful sight at times: endless fields of farmland dissolving into the horizon, or perhaps ending just before it with a line of trees denying you a view of the junction between brown dirt and blue sky. There’s an old train truss and a pretty little barn here and there, but it’s not a picture that isn’t replicated throughout the Midwest on countless county roads.
US 66’s advantage is the historic nature of the route, and the countless before you to have ventured upon it. It’s more modern and almost certainly less important than Gettysburg or the Alamo or the landing at St. Charles, Missouri that Lewis and Clark set off from en route to Oregon, but it’s still living history, worth study in its own right. The story of America in the twentieth century is along this road. Along with some pretty little barns to boot.
The Ariston Cafe, Litchfield, Illinois
The best way to describe Litchfield is idyllic. What more could you ask: just an hour from St. Louis, and forty minutes from Springfield, with a downtown more appropriate for filming a 1950s family picture than anchoring a central Illinois town. There’s the simplicity and beauty of a small town mixed with the maturity of a growing city, small town hospitality mixed with big city brains. As it barely enters the west side of the community, the Mother Road sees the distinction: the four-lane 1940 route skirts the back edge of the historic Ariston Café while the two-lane 1930 road takes travelers to the front door, dividing the town into modern and classic America.
Downtown LitchfieldTo the west, between the two alignments of 66 and the four lanes of Interstate 55, is a who’s who of fast food restaurants and roadside motel chains. Illinois 16 was recently upgraded to four lanes itself, making the vicinity of its exchange with the expressway look more like suburban St. Louis than rural Montgomery County. Eastbound 16 takes you into the heart of the city, though, and you would be hard pressed to imagine the town as anything but Rockwellian. This is Pleasantville, updated for the twenty-first century with ATM’s and a Domino’s Downtown LitchfieldPizza and more banks than you can have money to fill, but without losing the heart of a small town. Wal-Mart is banished to the modern west part of the city, while downtown plays home to an Army recruiting station and baseball card shop. Litchfield adapted to the loss of the road by both embracing change and persevering the past.
Call me a traitor: I shunned the tradition of the Ariston, one of the road’s principle Illinois landmarks, and dined at the more modern and cookie cutter McDonalds a block west in the “55” part of town. You can also call me Catholic and therefore justified, since it’s the Fish Filet sandwiches that drew me there on this Lenten Friday, but there was a small feeling of guilt, that I was a part of what helped kill many of the small towns that weren’t as lucky as this one. I could survive the feeling, though, perhaps in part because Litchfield itself survived. Besides, as I read my USA Today and listened to the restaurant manager describe to a weary traveler how to find their destination in Springfield, I couldn’t help but think of this less as one branch of a giant, heartless global corporation and more of just another small-town café trying to a make a buck or two. Yeah, it’s a stretch, but given the hospitality found at that Golden Arches franchise it’s not much of one.